This has been a busy week. I have to leave shortly for an evening meeting, tomorrow late afternoon/evening if it's not storming I have fieldwork to do with a student*, I need to finish weighing my little plants.

(*please let it be. Not that I like having to put off the fieldwork yet again but I could really use that time back).

(I had thought of making a run to McKinney this weekend, seeing as the "economic stimulus" check finally showed itself. But maybe not, now that I look at some of the yarns I have and want to start knitting up...perhaps better to pop a dvd in the player and knit away instead.)

And in the middle of it, I'm hit with startitis. I've been digging in the stash and finding stuff. Stuff I knew I had, but which I had kind of pushed to the back of my mind. Some of it stuff people gave me long ago (eep) which I never knit up: a nice skein of opal-colored not-quite-sure-what-fiber-it-is from Diann...which will someday become a large-ish scarf in the feather and fan pattern. (I even have the pattern card - from my Little Box of Scarves - tucked in the storage bin with the yarn).

And the nice Diaketo that I "won" by coming up with the most repulsive idea for the mis-use of a song in a commercial (James Brown's "Sex Machine" for one of those anti-ED drugs. And mark my words: it will be used someday. I feel it in my gut. It will only come down to who owns the rights to that song and how fast Merck or whomever can pay them off). That came from Em.

Actually, that's going to become another feather-and-fan scarf - I want to use it for the Misty Garden scarf in Scarf Style.

And I ran across lots of sock yarn. Like many knitters (perhaps like most knitters who make socks), I tend to hoard sock yarn. Part of it is that it's comparatively cheap...and you often need only buy a single skein of it to make socks. And the colors. It comes in such lovely colors. Colors to cheer you up when it's cold and grey out. Colors to make you feel the cool breezes of autumn when it's 100* out. Colors that remind you of flowers you can't grow because it's too hot and dry where you live. Colors that are like the coloring on some birds. Colors that you buy as a "treat" for yourself when you're down, or when you've done something particularly treat-worthy.

And I dug out the Andean silk that will someday become that turtleneck shrug I talked about. Looking at it, I decided I like it for that, whereas I don't like it so much for a Clapotis any more.

The problem is, I have so many ongoing projects that all my row-counters are already employed in keeping track of rows I am knitting (and should be knitting) in my existing projects. And that's kind of my stop and my stay - I think I likened it once before to the drinker who uses his diamond pinky ring to scratch a line on the bottle: thus far and no farther.

So I will return to the Gentleman's Winter socks. Or maybe to the sleeves on the SitCom Chic. Or the test-knitting scarf for TChem. And long to finish something...both so I can call something finished, but also so I can start something new.